4 ms·

What? No Kindle support? What kind of asinine universe are we creating for ourselves? This is what I never understood about iTunes: 1. The world discovers M

by mcantor 16y ago

What? No Kindle support? What kind of asinine universe are we creating for ourselves? This is what I never understood about iTunes: 1. The world discovers MP3s: music that you can listen to on any digital music player! You know how you can take a tape cassette and play it in any cassette player, and hear music? It's like that! Yay! 2. iTunes sells iTunes music: music that you can listen to on... Apple devices! Wait, what? You mean I can download digital music from iTunes, but it might not work on my digital music player? It must be because it's better, then. What's that? There's no technical advantage? I am confused! Now it's happening again! We have eBooks of various assortments. You read eBooks with eReaders. Unless they're incompatible. How can you tell? Well, it depends on where you bought each of them. It's getting to where you need a damn chart. We don't make cars that only run on certain fucking roads. Why do we make music that only plays on certain fucking music players?! I know all about DRM, and the incentives behind it. I know "why" it works this way. I'm just lamenting how stupid it is that we are making things more complicated, and less inter-operable. It's fucking 2010. We're in the future now. We should know better.

djacobs 16y ago
An e-book's container format is (essentially) orthogonal to whether or not it has DRM. Kindle uses a convoluted, badly designed container, where everyone else uses ePub, which is an open standard. Bottom line: There is not Kindle support because Kindle is too picky.
inklesspen 16y ago
iTunes sells AAC music files: music that you can listen to on any device that supports AAC, which is a part of the MPEG-4 standard (just like MP3 is a part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards). This AAC music used to be sold with Apple DRM on it, but no longer does. And of course there is a technical advantage; AAC sounds better at low bit rates than MP3 does.

by mcantor 16y ago

djacobs 16y ago

An e-book's container format is (essentially) orthogonal to whether or not it has DRM. Kindle uses a convoluted, badly designed container, where everyone else uses ePub, which is an open standard. Bottom line: There is not Kindle support because Kindle is too picky.

inklesspen 16y ago

iTunes sells AAC music files: music that you can listen to on any device that supports AAC, which is a part of the MPEG-4 standard (just like MP3 is a part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards). This AAC music used to be sold with Apple DRM on it, but no longer does. And of course there is a technical advantage; AAC sounds better at low bit rates than MP3 does.